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President Museveni has attributed a recent attack on a Ugandan army base in Buulo Mareer in Somalia to poorly prepared soldiers who were involved due to institutional corruption.

President Museveni has attributed the recent attack on the Ugandan army base in Somalia to soldiers who were poorly prepared for combat operations and wound up there due to institutional corruption. He said this while at the National Leadership Institute (NALI) in Kyankwanzi.

“There was this problem in Somalia, our forces yesterday but one re-entered that place where the UDPF had panicked from. The terrorists ran away and now we are getting more facts about what the mistake was. The mistake is really corruption, but we shall get the details,” the President said.

The President chastised the culprits, stating that there were two troops with the rank of major. “I will get the identity of the other one. But there is one called Okia, who apparently was in the army shop in Kampala. He is the one who told the soldiers to run away. So, he is under arrest.”

President Museveni also urged leaders to be in the forefront of encouraging their people to deeply become involved in modern, calculated, and commercial farming in order to join the money economy during his lecture on the theme of Leaders and Wealth Creation.

“This is a very important topic for you and for me also because this is what I have been involved in for the last 60 years.”

The President stated that socioeconomic transformation is a key component of wealth creation. He claimed that if a group spends a lot of time on extension employees, he usually has issues. “What will they increase? They are ignorant because socio-economic transition is the problem,” he said.

The President also supported the idea of MPs serving as the movement’s leaders to lead the socioeconomic change of society rather than giving the job to extension agents in the Ministry of Agriculture.

General Museveni instructed MPs to always internalize the social structure and gave them the additional job of focusing on the monitoring, mobilization, and guiding of the populace in government-sponsored programs like the PDM, which is administered by the populace itself.

“We did a number of experiments including Operation Wealth Creation, NAADs, and so on, but finally now we have come to PDM, which is stakeholder-run. Now your job is to mobilize those stakeholders and supervise them and guide them, together with all of us,” he added.

President Museveni guided the MPs through the development of Europe from the lowest classes to modernity in great detail, pushing them to follow that path.

“This is very, very important because it’s very dangerous to be in leadership when you don’t know the anatomy of society. It is very dangerous for you, “the President emphasized.

According to the President, there were four classes in European society at the time of the French Revolution.

“You had the aristocrats, the feudalists and the middle class whom they were calling the bourgeoisie. I think these examples could help you by looking at that structure of society,” he counseled.

In response to the MP from the Abim district’s question about budgeting, President Museveni underlined the need of prioritization as a strategy for implementing infrastructure projects.

“We should prioritize and conclude one thing, like for instance electricity has arrived in all the districts except very few, at least up to the district headquarters. We are now next struggling with the tarmac roads from North to South, East to West. That’s what we have been able to do. So that should be principle number one that will guide us when we meet to budget together,” President Museveni said.

Regarding group efforts, President Museveni asked Parliamentarians to make use of group welfare by ensuring that initiatives like universal primary and secondary education are successfully carried out without interference. He cautioned them not to take on constituent demands for which the government had already found suitable remedies, referring to such demands as the perpetuation of poverty.

“But then the second one, which seems to be confusing you, is the issue of collective welfare. You heard what our former Chairman for Abim District Hon. Ochero was saying. I’m the one paying school fees, I’m the one burying dead people, I’m the one- the one…, but we have got a collective solution. We have got collective solutions. Why don’t you use those?”

“The Collective solution which I brought to the NRM in 1996 was free education for the children of the poor. Why don’t we support that? Because I wrote it, the headmaster refused to implement it, the Chairman Ochero who was in Abim, saw the headmaster refusing to implement my policy, he kept quiet about it, now he’s suffering. So, the question is, why do you take on the burden of education? How many are you going to educate? You’re going to educate 20, 30, but how many in your constituency need education? And yet, the collective answer was education for all, free education for all.”

President Museveni supported NRM values such as patriotism, Pan-Africanism, democracy, and socioeconomic reform when it came to benefits and pay. He explained that it would be premature to pay soldiers significant wages without first laying the groundwork for revenue collection. He claimed that some African nations had failed as a result of the error.

“If you prematurely pay hefty salaries for soldiers, where will you get enough money to pay a big number of people? You will not manage. That’s how all these countries are collapsing, these African countries. Nigeria, Chad, even Congo here, all those including Central African Republic, they can’t defend themselves because they made a mistake of doing things at the wrong time,” President Museveni said.